Albertadromeus Pronunciation

Fun Facts

• ✓Albertadromeus had fused ankle and shin bones, a feature so unusual that scientists made it part of the species name: 'syntarsus' literally means 'fused ankle', and this fusion likely made its legs act like a single powerful spring when it ran.
• ✓At roughly 33 pounds and 5 feet long, Albertadromeus was the smallest known herbivorous dinosaur in its entire ecosystem, sharing the Oldman Formation with massive plant-eaters like hadrosaurs that weighed over 3 tons.
• ✓The Oldman Formation of Alberta, where Albertadromeus lived 72 million years ago, was a lush coastal floodplain criss-crossed by rivers, more like a warm, wet version of Louisiana than the cold Canadian landscape we see today.
• ✓Scientists believe Albertadromeus may have been a burrower or at least used dense vegetation and low ground cover to hide from predators, a survival strategy similar to modern small mammals living in lion country.
• ✓Albertadromeus was only formally named and described in 2012, making it one of the more recently discovered Canadian dinosaurs, and its discovery helped scientists understand that small plant-eaters filled important ecological roles that were previously overlooked in large dinosaur faunas.